Professor Gabbott will appear on the show, airing today (Thursday 21 February), to discuss how her research overturned a long-standing theory on how vertebrates evolved their eyes by identifying remarkable details of the retina in the eyes of 300 million year-old lamprey and hagfish fossils.

The programme explores how fossil hagfish eyes were well-developed, indicating that the ancient animal could see, whereas their living counterparts are completely blind after millions of years of eye degeneration – a kind of reverse evolution.

The research was made possible by using a high-powered scanning electron microscope to magnify the eye 5,000 times. This enabled them to see that the fossil retina is composed of minute structures called melanosomes - the same structures that occur in human eyes and prevent stray light bouncing around in the eye allowing us to form a clear visual image.

Professor Gabbott said: “The program shows how new fossil evidence bears on an iconic evolutionary problem: the early evolution of the vertebrate eye. Sight is perhaps our most cherished sense but its evolution in vertebrates is enigmatic and a cause célèbre for creationists. We will now scrutinise the eyes of other ancient vertebrate fossils to see if we can finally build a picture of the sequence of events that took place in early vertebrate eye evolution.”